Processing Notes When you travel between offices

05-16-2008, 05:34 PM

My job requires me to travel between three locations on a weekly basis. I have read the postings on how people process their meeting notes. My problem is that I need my notes taken at a previous location handy when I am at a different location for fear I will have to refer to meeting notes taken. I read some people keep journals and others process their notes as prescribed by GTD.

I would like to hear from people who work in multiple offices on how they process and keep track of notes.

When I was travelling a lot, I used a journal (moleskine or something similar) to take meeting notes.
After processing the notes, drew a diagonal line over the page: I could easily see that I processed the notes and I could still read the notes if I had to.
I usually only carried the current notebook; sometimes I also had the previous notebook (just after starting a new notebook in order to keep some history).
I could do about a month with a notebook and I seldom needed to refer to things from previous notebooks.

Comment

If I have to work from paper for note-taking, I just carry the Moleskine I usually use and flip to the page of notes I need. Important bits of information I expect to retrieve before fully processing my notes get starred or underlined or highlighted somehow.

If I'm working out of my electronic system, which I prefer, but isn't always appropriate, I open a task for the meeting/podcast/whatever, and add a comment to the task for each piece of information I need to capture. That usually breaks up the notes enough they're easy to turn into individual tasks or store as reference, and I've got the notes available immediately. If I need to share them right away, I just delegate the task with all the meeting notes so they're available to my teammates.